vegan, skeptic, atheist, libertarian

One Week No Social Networking: What Have I Learned

It’s been over one week since I last looked at my Twitter, Facebook, or Google+ feeds. I haven’t looked at any of my friends’ feeds either. I don’t know what’s trending, I don’t know if there has been any in-fighting within the freethought community, and I really don’t know if there has been anything super cool and new. I’m very disconnected.

Social networking was how I connected to a lot of skeptics, and now that’s gone. I haven’t been good on emailing people or leaving comments. I need to get better on that. I haven’t instant messaged enough people. I need to get better on that. I haven’t tried to setup any hangouts, but I’ve been pretty busy, not sure I can get better on that. I’ve definitely learned that social networking was a key way I got involved in the skeptic movement.

Perhaps the biggest, most important thing that I have learned is that a lot of skeptic content and commentary is now hidden behind the walls of Facebook and Twitter. Both those services do not lend themselves well to be searched by Google, and neither service has its own decent search to begin with. When I presumably rejoin the world of social networking, it will be nigh impossible to go back and look at what happened. I find this distressing.

There does need to be a way to better keep track of skeptic history on social networking, or anyone’s history really. This is so far, the biggest take away from my admittedly small sample size of time away from social networking.